The night they arrived, the city was illuminated with gaslights as Giovanni Muzzi’s horse-drawn wagon took them down part of Bleecker and then over to Third Street. They went down a hill into a section that looked completely different from what they had passed through.

“This is il Buco—the Hollow,” he told them. “This is where the Italians live. The Americans don’t want it, it’s not good enough for them.”

The part of town they were in bordered on Cato Creek and was in a dip, or hollow, between two hills. Considered too difficult to build on, it had been left as a dump area and was cheap land. Now over two hundred Calabrian families had occupied the area, carting off the junk, shoring up the creek banks, terracing the land, building on it.

Five streets—Yale, Denny, and Canal on one side of the creek and Mohawk and John on the other—made up the heart of the Hollow. It looked like an Italian hill village. No matter how harshly the homeland had treated them, once away, the immigrants could do no more than reproduce their lost home in the new land.

Umbertina saw the solid, closed housefronts facing the street, while in the rear a conglomerate of little gardens, arbors, fruit trees, vines, sitting spaces, clotheslines, and woodpiles flourished. Good, she thought. It was the sign of a people used to want, used to making every foothold of soil flower and bear fruit. Not like the American homes she had passed, where wide expanses of grass, instead of being used for pasturing animals, were kept idle, like green rugs.

The Hollow was comfortable and familiar. The homes were close together, creating a packed density as if they were still huddled in land-poor Calabria. Scorning the plentiful wood of the boundless American forests, the Italians still built stone walls and stucco houses and laid cement where an American might have let grass grow.

Everywhere was the sense of bounds that had been the sign of property in Italy; even the cement tubs for flowers, the rock-studded planters, or the flowerbeds marked out by bricks showed the passerby a sense of order and propriety. It was the order of peasants used to protecting every bit of land that could be called one’s own.

Umbertina gazed with pleasure at the plants growing on front ledges from tomato cans, oil tins, basins, or tubs. But the real miracle was behind the stone and cement in the cascade of cultivation that flowed from the terraces down to the creek. This was the true culture of the uprooted, patiently preserved.